Endsleigh Insurance Saves £1.3m With Workforce Optimisation From Azzurri

Azzurri installs Workforce Optimisation project based on the Avaya Workforce Management (WFM) platform
Project lays the foundation for Endsleigh’s multi-channel contact centre ambitions

Endsleigh Insurance, the UK-based insurance intermediary specialising in the student, education and graduate markets, has achieved £1.3m in operational savings at its contact centres as a result of a Workforce Optimisation project designed and implemented by Azzurri Communications. The significant savings, which were achieved without any impact on the contact centre’s headcount, were the result of improvements to the company’s resource allocation and forecasting capabilities using the Avaya Workforce Management (WFM) platform implemented by Azzurri.

As an organisation that primarily serves young professionals and students, Endsleigh understands better than most the rapidly changing communications preferences of the increasingly prominent ‘internet native’ demographic, which demands immediate access to services wherever and whenever it needs them.

For an insurance provider like Endsleigh, this means offering a blend of self-service solutions (such as being able to change address details online) combined with agent interaction across multiple channels (such as webchat, email, telephone, SMS etc.). The company turned to Azzurri to map out the organisation’s multi-year transformational journey to become a fully integrated, multi-channel organisation. It was decided that a Workforce Management project would be carried out initially to ensure that adequate resource allocation and planning was in place to enable the multi-channel infrastructure to function as intended.

Workforce Optimisation involves the integration of a number of components including call recording, performance management, quality management and workforce scheduling and analytics within the contact centre. Together these components make contact centres more efficient while improving staff retention and morale, and improving the overall customer experience. In addition to the £1.3m net reduction in operational costs, Endsleigh received a number of additional benefits from the project:

An agile contact centre: Since implementing workforce management Endsleigh can respond to changes in demand more quickly; matching the number of people to the right task at the right time in the most cost-efficient way possible.

Comprehensive and accurate resource planning: Forecasting of agents’ time is now highly accurate with deviation levels as low as 5%.
Funded additional revenue growth: The operational savings achieved have been reinvested into the business to fund new revenue-generating activities.
Secured business support for additional change management projects: Azzurri’s diligence to demonstrate value throughout the project and the operational savings that were realised has helped the internal IT organisation make the business case for continuous improvement and change management.

Significantly improved processes which affect colleague retention, morale and adherence: Improvements to the planning of resources has improved the distribution of agent workloads, ensured better use of appropriate skills and reduced the number of requests for last-minute overtime. Agent adherence levels raised to over 90%.

Most crucially of all, the Workforce Optimisation project has laid the operational foundations for Endsleigh to become a leading multi-channel organisation without negatively impacting the company’s critical contact centre colleagues

“We knew that becoming a multi-channel organisation would require the whole of the business to be behind the vision at every step, and Azzurri understood this too,” comments Phil Baker, Head of Operational Change at Endsleigh. “Azzurri understood that our needs go beyond the technical requirements and were more than open to taking on the responsibility of ensuring the project was well received by the wider business. They helped us to involve the workforce at the very beginning so that they would be comfortable with the changes being proposed and didn’t feel we were imposing a ‘Big Brother’ style regime to watch over them. Azzurri helped our people to see the benefits that better planning would have on them, such as fewer last minute requests for overtime, a more even distribution of the overall workload and fairer holiday booking procedures, among many others. The results couldn’t have been better. Instead of agents accepting the new processes begrudgingly, they are now real advocates of them!”

With Workforce Optimisation in place, Endsleigh now has the tools and data available to better plan its contact centre resources flexibly and efficiently, and is now proceeding onto the next phase of its journey to building a multi-channel organisation with Azzurri.

“Azzurri understands the journey we are undertaking and the problems we are trying to solve along the way. I am confident that Azzurri is taking on all of our IT challenges and working with us to deliver our long-term goal of an efficient, multi-channel capability,” concluded Baker.

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About Azzurri Communications
Azzurri is the UK’s leading independent provider of managed communications services. Our award winning products, services and solutions help customers turn networks and telecoms into strategic assets.